All smell is disease

‘All smell is, if it be intense, immediate acute disease.’ Edwin Chadwick, England’s first Public Health Commissioner, made this claim in 1846, adding that ‘all smells’ weaken the body, rendering it vulnerable to contagion.(1) Belief in miasma (smells arising from decomposing matter) as the cause of cholera and other disease originated in the Middle Ages and remained deeply engrained in the Victorian public consciousness. In 1858, fear around invisible stench reached fever pitch in London, as the odour from sewage in the River Thames became unbearable. It was in this context that John Roddam Spencer Stanhope painted Thoughts of the Past (1859), in which the image of a sex-worker standing by an open window overlooking the polluted river, is bound up with contemporary feelings of fear, disgust and empathy.

The idea that ‘smell is disease’ informs many Pre-Raphaelite paintings including Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine (1881-1882), in which stifling incense evokes the gloomy underworld and the Spring Goddesses brooding thoughts. In Waterhouse’s Psyche opening the Golden Box (1903), fumes rise from the casket, sending Psyche into a deep sleep. Both paintings connect with ideas about the drug-like effect of heavy and oppressive odours on the body and mind, depressing the mood, making the heartbeat sluggish and causing fatigue.(2) Waterhouse created a similar image of an inquisitive girl opening a casket in his painting Pandora (1896, private collection); here, all the evils of the world are released in the form of a miasmic odour from the box, suggesting long-established anxieties about smell as an indicator of physical and moral corruption, even after it was established in the 1860s and 1870s that germs rather than Miasma cause disease.

In Evelyn de Morgan’s Medea (1889), the enchantress’s tall, slender body is elongated in a flowing, rose-madder robe, with violet shadows. It forms a visual parallel to the glass vial, glowing, eery violet in her hand, and containing its deadly purple, liquid contents. The depiction of perfumes, scented potions, and aromatic herbs lends a dangerous, exotic quality to Victorian Aesthetic paintings of witches and femmes fatales. Some examples not in the show include Frederick Sandys’s Medea (1866–68, Williamson Art Gallery and Museum) and Morgan Le Fay (about 1863–64, Birmingham Museum and Art

Gallery), Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886, Tate Britain) and De Morgan’s The Love Potion (1903, De Morgan Collection).

Miasma theory also informed audience perceptions of Pre-Raphaelite art. Critics responded to the hyper-sensuousness of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings and poetry by imagining them to emanate cloying perfume. One critic found his work to ‘stifle the senses with overpowering sickliness, as of too much civet’; another found it to ‘affect us like some pungent and pervasive perfume’; and yet another noted that ‘amid all the odorous deliciousness, we gasp for a break of outer air again’.(3) Such ideas chimed with the popular science writings of Grant Allen (1848-1899). In Physiological Aesthetics (1877), Allen argued that since pleasure or pain results from healthy or injurious actions upon the cells and tissues of the body, the ‘business of art’ was to combine ‘as many as possible pleasurable sensations’ and to ‘exclude painful ones’. ‘Cloying oneself with … strong perfumes’ could ‘yield painful sensations’.(4) By drawing on this language, Rossetti’s critics warned of the vigilance required when consuming his works. With their gorgeous colours and suggestions of music, perfumes, and the pleasures of taste and touch, his works could fatigue, corrupt, or intoxicate the unwary viewer.

Dr Christina Bradstreet This text accompanies the exhibition Scented Visions: Smell in Art 1850-1915 Watts Gallery, Compton. 15 May – 9 November 2025

Endnotes

1. E. Chadwick, ‘Metropolitan Sewage Committee Proceedings’, Parliamentary Papers, 10, 1846, p. 651. 2. See for example, G. Jaeger, Dr. Jaeger’s Essays on Health-Culture, London, 1887, p. 268. 3. R. Buchanan, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, Contemporary Review, 18, October 1871, pp. 338-39. W. J. Dawson, The Makers of Modern English: A Popular Handbook to the Greater Poets of the Century, London, 1890, p. 55. J. C. Kernahan, Sorrow and Song, London, 1894, p. 55. 4. G. Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, London, 1877, pp. 40-41.